518 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 617. 



has already threatened both the morals 

 and the safety of the community. Selfish 

 gratification is a temptation to which he 

 may or may not yield, but his inheritance 

 from the university translates wealth to 

 be a means of accomplishing the highest 

 means of life, and saves him from that 

 narrow, common complaisancy of wealth 

 which is the dry rot of character. 



In this age of self-appointed erratic and 

 dangerous regulators of society when an 

 unreasoning and destructive discontent fre- 

 quently prompts to crude measures whose 

 real purpose is a blind upheaval of the ex- 

 isting order of things, the intelligence and 

 the calm balance of the university man of 

 affairs must be the corner stones of public 

 safety. His trained mind taught to analyze 

 and to test by the records of experience 

 no less than by the precepts of science does 

 not lose its poise before either the shallow 

 plausibilities of the advocate of Utopia or 

 the sinister deceptions of the revolutionary 

 reformer or what has come to be nearly 

 as bad, by the egoistic and blundering 

 although much-applauded strenuosity of 

 the present time. It is not to be supposed 

 for a moment that every subject of uni- 

 versity training will issue from its halls 

 the ideal well-rounded citizen but judg- 

 ment must be passed upon such matters in 

 view of their resultant tendencies. A fair 

 and careful scrutiny of the impress made 

 through the professional schools of the uni- 

 versity, from the older faculties of philos- 

 ophy and theology to the modern faculty 

 of engineering, upon the broad moral, gov- 

 ernmental, professional and business af- 

 fairs of the most cultivated communities 

 of the world, conclusively confirms and 

 supports these observations. 



The creative or evolutionary influence of 

 the university upon the community is ex- 

 ercised chiefly, and it will ultimately be 

 exercised entirely, through its professional 

 faculties, its faculty of philosophy already 



having become essentially a professional 

 faculty of teaching, a character which it is 

 bound fully to assume hereafter. This 

 is the highest and ultimately the complete 

 mission of the university. This means 

 with absolute certainty that professional 

 instruction shall be given not by closet pro- 

 fessors, but by men who are students in the 

 highest and best sense of the word, pro- 

 found students not only of the abstract 

 principles of their profession, but of the 

 play and power of those principles upon 

 the affairs of men. This knowledge must 

 be gained by .taking their full part in hu- 

 man experience and not by withdrawing 

 from it. Their investigations must be 

 made largely in the practical operations of 

 their professions. In other words, they 

 must be men of affairs as well as students. 

 A living and forceful quality can be given 

 to instruction in no other way whatever 

 but by actual contact with the things en- 

 countered in practical experience and pre- 

 cisely in the relations disclosed by that ex- 

 perience. 



Some of the professional faculties have 

 already benefited by this quickening and 

 energizing influence of living contact with 

 their professions. The medical faculties 

 are composed largely of eminent prac- 

 titioners and it is not too much to say that 

 it would be impossible to give the requisite 

 instruction were it otherwise. It is well 

 known that most serious defects in the 

 present educational administration of the 

 university faculties of law and engineering 

 are due to the fact that too many instruct- 

 ors fail of that true development and 

 broad training gained only by actual pro- 

 fessional experience. It may be con- 

 fidently stated that instruction in profes- 

 sional engineering subjects can not now be 

 given with the necessary breadth and effi- 

 ciency without supplementing the impera- 

 tively necessary work of the study by ex- 

 tended practical experience. And those ob- 



